Modern businesses are versatile and flexible enough to accommodate talents and manpower irrespective of their locations. In the digital era, employees can deliver their output sitting hundreds of miles away from the business headquarters and can still stay in continuous communication through digital means. Hiring a remote workforce is has now become a common attribute of modern work culture.
But most businesses are aware of the challenges in outsourcing or remote staffing. Often companies and Human Resource specialists in business blogs complain about onboarding employees who proved to be under-performers compared to their in-house team. Why does this happens? What can help companies getting on board the deserving people in the befitting job roles? Here we will focus on these by explaining the common mistakes of companies in hiring remote staff.
1. Not Doing Enough Research
When hiring a workforce remotely, you should not be limited to the standard or conventional vision of the job roles and responsibilities. You can do away with many so-called workplace practices and prejudices and simply focus on productivity and output. The employees don't have to reside closer to the workplace, but they need to deliver up to your expectations.
Since with remote staffing, you have a wider and vast array of options; the challenges are equally bigger as you need to consider multiple geo-social factors besides other considerations and constraints like paying remuneration as per the standard rate of those foreign countries. So, you need to have solid groundwork and research on hiring the required staff from various parts of the globe, along with the respective opportunities and constraints.
2. Hiring Employees With No Experience with Remote Work
If you think a remotely working developer needs the same skill set and job oriented expertise like your in-house developers, you are likely to on-board the wrong people. Remote employees are likely to have a completely different skill set and expertise level than the in-house employees. First of all, they have to be more committed and professional in approach. They have to maintain a schedule when nobody is around to look after his work. Secondly, they need to be highly responsive and flexible to your working hours and schedule in spite of the differences in time zone.
3. Hiring Employees Based Just on their Resume
While for hiring employees, a resume serves the invaluable purpose of introducing a person with his qualifications, experience, and skills, often such information cannot be taken for granted in face value. For remote staffing where the scopes are limited to get in touch with the employee, the resume is not enough source of information to evaluate and take a call. Moreover, personality problems and other issues that can hamper productivity, in the long run, can be really counterproductive. Such personality traits and behavioral elements cannot be judged solely on the candidate's resume.
This is why taking interviews or conducting in-person interviews through your offshore offices or remote conferencing are important to get a deeper sense of the abilities and personality traits of the prospective candidate. By asking questions and through cross-questioning, you can always get a sense of their commitments and future goals in professional and personal life.
4. Not Meeting The Candidate In Person
The best hiring process is to meet the candidate in person and having a one to one interlocution. If this is not possible for remote staffing and outsourcing, at least the employers can utilize modern technologies like video conferencing or a Skype interview as preferred by both. There cannot be a better option if you can conduct face to face interviews with the candidate by arranging it in your offshore offices.
Many employers know that the body language of the employees actually means a lot for judging the personality traits and leadership attributes. This is why, for some job roles where the hired employee needs to look after a large team, the candidate needs to be interviewed sitting face to face. You can also conduct remote interviews for preliminary screening, and for final round interviews you can call a selective few candidates to your headquarters.
There are several great video interviewing or meeting tools that can really work great for connecting staff and staffers through a crisp video interface. Appear.in is a superb video meeting tool of this sort. It doesn't require the guests to register even. Zoom, Adobe Connect, and Google Hangouts are great tools for remote video interviews.
5. Not Having an Organized Interview Process
Nothing is more important with respect to remote staff recruitment than the interviewing process. When you need to pool the best talent to stay ahead of other competitors, you need to evaluate the available talent thoroughly and only select the ones with the highest credentials, expertise, and performance. This is why the interviewing process needs to be well-thought-out, multi-staged and rigorous. Instead of cutting short the regular interview process, for remote hiring, you actually need to be more quality-focused.
Only a well- organized and well-articulated interview process can help employers get the best of the talent pool. Other than the core skills, some of the key elements that your interview process should focus on including the following.
- Exceptional proficiency in English
- Quality exposure across projects and relevant experience
- Very good customer reviews
- A great portfolio of finished and successful projects.
- Availability, time zone and response time.
Conclusion
Getting the right talent on board is a key concern for most companies now. As talent pool in the short and long run can actually shape the success stories of across the niches, the leading companies now prefer outsourcing or remote staffing just to take the opportunity of getting broader exposure. But corresponding to this emerging scope of remote staffing opportunities, companies also need to avoid the mistakes and pitfalls most suffer from.
About the Author: Atman Rathod is the Co-founder at CMARIX TechnoLabs Pvt. Ltd., a leading web and mobile app development company with 13+ years of experience. He loves to write about technology, startups, entrepreneurship and business. His creative abilities, academic track record and leadership skills made him one of the key industry influencers as well.
